Day 180

Spoiler Alert! May contain planning-stage plot/character details or other spoilers!

14 Mar 2017

After all my crowing about how I’ve gotten so much faster and more productive, this final quarter of the book is turning out to be a slow, painful, fight for every minute push. Some of that is valid distraction. Some of it is spring, allergies, increasing outside pressures as the world tries to break in on me again. Lots of it is panic about what I’m doing - is it good enough, is it going in the right direction, will I be able to take it where I need to go…

I just finished Sarah J Maas’ A Court of Mist and Fury, and wow. Just, wow. I’m so challenged by these excellent books that deal with all sorts of messy, complex issues, and tell a compelling, exciting, fast-paced, high-stakes story along with it. I don’t want to just throw up my hands and go, oh well, it’s my debut novel and I’ll do better later in my career, oh well, I don’t have a big publisher or pro editor to push me, oh well, I just tell weird, indulgent tales that are literary and weakly plotted. But despite my prideful determination, I don’t have much more than self-aggrandizing assertions behind the push for better, more, faster. I spend the whole day thinking about how I should do something about my plot, and then can’t get more than two minutes into it before cringing and turning away in exhausted confusion. Damn plot. Damn character arcs. Damn artistic undisciplined mindset that fails to think in a structured manner. Also, damn distractions, people bopping around constantly, and reality that expects me to be responsible for anything beyond creative output.

Ok, rage over. Here’s today’s plan; make use of the pathetic amount of time left to push further on with the draft built on shaky plot and characterization and worry about fixing it at a later date. Now that I’ve fully established that hiring an editor does not magically push things in the right direction, I have to hold the tension of knowing things need to be done, and making myself remember and do them or suffer. So, yay.

What lots of it comes down to; be nastier to Cole. Demand more from plot. Make it less about emo-ness, more about action. Which means yet another whole draft that I don’t have time to write. For a completely different book. In, oh, about two weeks. Bleagh. I want to stab something. Or blow it up. Etc.

Tuesday

Start Time: 3:45 & 7 pm

Location: Abbotsford; home; couch

Gear: flipchart/taped tags

Drinking: Malbec

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